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Review of "Manual for Survival" by Kate Brown

Article  in  Journal of Radiological Protection · March 2019

DOI: 10.1088/1361-6498/ab17f2

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OPINION ARTICLE

Review of “Manual for Survival” by Kate Brown

Jim Smith

School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Portsmouth, Burnaby Building, Burnaby

Road, Portsmouth, PO1 3QL. Email: jim.smith@port.ac.uk.

Manual for Survival is an interesting, but deeply flawed history of the health and environmental

impacts of Chernobyl, the worst technological disaster in human history. It would be all too easy to

dismiss it for its multiple omissions, inconsistencies and errors. But it is important that we in the

radiation protection community take it seriously and respond in detail to its claims - of major low-

dose radiation effects we have missed - with clear evidence and explanation of why we think it is

wrong in a way which non-specialists can clearly understand. With the notable exception of Mikhail

Balonov’s response 1 to the Yablokov 2 Chernobyl report I think it is something we have failed to do

with previous claims of major low-dose radiation effects after Chernobyl.

I was interviewed by Kate Brown for this book at a meeting in Florida on radiation effects on wildlife

at Chernobyl. For about an hour and a half I was subjected to what felt to me like an aggressive

cross-examination on a huge range of subjects relating to radiation, including the Hiroshima and

Nagasaki bomb survivor studies, cancer, wildlife effects, contamination of food and dose

reconstruction. I answered all her questions and where I had doubts later followed up with

information and evidence. I emerged from the interview feeling mentally exhausted (really!) but

nevertheless happy, even a little elated. Despite my reservations about her scientific knowledge,

here, I felt, was a serious and unbiased historian determined to get to the truth about the hugely

complex and controversial issue of the health and environmental consequences of Chernobyl.

I was wrong.
On getting the review copy of this book I couldn’t help but turn first to the pages dealing with my

interview (I guess most people would do the same). I was shocked and disappointed to find that the

information and opinions I had given on radiation effects on wildlife at Chernobyl had been

dismissed. According to Brown, I was a physicist (used almost as a term of abuse in the context) who

didn’t feel it necessary to go to Chernobyl to draw my pre-formed conclusions about the accident

effects. Brown did not report what I had told her – I first studied Chernobyl fallout in the English

Lake District in 1990 and first did fieldwork in the Chernobyl affected areas of Ukraine and Belarus in

1994. I clearly remember being quite worried about what were – to me at that time – largely

unknown risks of radiation at Chernobyl. I have stopped counting the number of times I have visited

the Chernobyl contaminated areas since, but I guess it is around 40. I am happy to be argued with,

but it is poor and biased scholarship to dismiss my evidence (and that of my Belarussian colleagues

who worked in the Exclusion Zone for many years) based on what seems to me to be clear

misinformation.

This, I think, is just one symptom of a deeply flawed approach to the complex information on

Chernobyl, but I’ll try to give this book as fair a review as I can. You can judge whether I have

achieved that, but will certainly be more in-depth than the rather superficial and misleading review

provided by Nature 3.

Dosimetry and Dose Reconstruction

The treatment of radiation dose and dose estimation is unquestionably biased in this book. The

author wishes to make the argument that “the physicists” have got it wrong about radiation doses

after Chernobyl. She begins with a description of an interview with Lynn Anspaugh, an

internationally respected radiation expert who, amongst other things, co-led the 2006 IAEA

“Environmental” Chernobyl Forum report 4. In my brief experience of contact with him during the

preparation of the report, I found him to be hugely knowledgeable about the many aspects of
radiation and dose reconstruction after Chernobyl. Kate Brown apparently didn’t come to the same

conclusion. From her telephone interview, she takes one piece of information – that early-on,

Anspaugh (presumably estimating total Global contamination from Chernobyl) took just two data

points to estimate fallout in the whole of Romania. She then uses this piece of information to

attempt to discredit the entire field of radiation protection dosimetry!! I guess, as a good scientist,

Anspaugh realised that in an initial estimate of impacts of Chernobyl (there have been many much

better estimates since including the Russia/Belarus/Ukraine/EU Atlas 5 and many more), that the

fallout in Romania wasn’t going to make too much difference and he made the best estimate he

could.

What is astonishing (literally, jaw-droppingly astonishing) is that Manual for Survival fails to mention,

in the section of the book dealing with dosimetry, all the measurements conducted in the years after

the accident both in the former Soviet countries and abroad. I believe Brown that in Soviet times,

information on these was (unforgivably) kept secret, but it is there and now you don’t have to dig

around in Soviet archives to find it: reports and results (but sadly not all the original data) have been

in the international scientific literature for more than 20 years. For example, in his paper for the

1996 Minsk conference 6, Mikhail Balonov reported “one million measurements of 134Cs and 137Cs in

the body”.

Those seeking to criticise the consensus on Chernobyl often accuse scientists of only focusing on one

isotope – radiocaesium. It’s true that there are far more measurements and studies on caesium than

on other isotopes, because it is relatively long-lived and can be reasonably cheaply and easily

measured by gamma spectrometry and whole body counting. But that doesn’t mean that other

isotopes were ignored: the scientific literature contains many papers on many other isotopes,

including 131I, 90Sr and transuranium elements which Brown could have referred to, but chose not to.

Balonov’s short paper alone 6 mentions hundreds of 90Sr measurements, discusses the change in

isotopes contributing to dose over time since the accident and presents dosimetry models which
include the key isotopes needed for long term prediction. There are many others presenting dose

reconstruction models. Brown makes much of the “cocktail” of radionuclides residents were

exposed to, in particular 90Sr: this has also been covered in the scientific literature. Balonov 6 states

“…due to the low content of 90Sr in the Chernobyl release and [low] fallout outside the 30-Km Zone

its contribution to the internal effective dose does not exceed 5-10%, according to intake calculation

and direct measurements of 90Sr in human bones (autopsy samples). Similar contribution from the

inhalation of 238Pu, 239Pu, 240Pu and 241Am originated from 241Pu will not exceed 1% even for outdoor

workers”. There is a wealth of other information on all aspects of dosimetry in the scientific

literature amounting to hundreds, likely thousands of articles. Again, Brown doesn’t have to believe

Balonov and all the other scientists, but to omit this evidence is shocking.

Having dismissed “the physicists” method of dose estimation and reconstruction, Manual for

Survival goes on to argue that “the physicians” had a much better method which was ignored. She

cites work by Vorobiev (I haven’t seen this Russian language work, but will try to get hold of a copy)

which claims a biodosimetry method based on analysis of chromosome damage which is much more

accurate that whole body counting and dose reconstruction. This method seems to give much higher

accumulated doses than “the physicists” methods.

Is it true that biodosimetry methods are better than physical measurements and models ? As far as I

know, the radiation protection community only uses biodosimetry to reconstruct doses after high

exposures which couldn’t be evaluated using physical methods. Even the most recent attempts

(using much more sophisticated technology than was available in 1986) to develop a unique

radiation biomarker for low dose exposure have failed. I checked this with Geraldine Thomas,

Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College and she confirmed (pers. comm) that

biodosimetry only works well for high doses. That is not to say that such attempts are not valuable,

just that there is very little support for Brown’s claim that biodosimetric methods in the former
Soviet Union were better than direct measurement of gamma-emitters and dose reconstruction for

other nuclides.

Effects on wildlife

This section is so biased and misleading that I hardly know where to start. Brown has chosen to

believe the evidence of Anders P. Møller and Tim Mousseau that there are major effects of radiation

on organisms at Chernobyl at dose rates much lower than expected, and that wildlife is severely

damaged in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ). In other parts of the book, Brown is careful to

question the veracity of her sources. But surprisingly she fails to mention that Anders P. Møller is a

highly controversial scientist (in radioecology and in his previous field of evolutionary biology): an

article in Nature reports that he was once found guilty of manipulating data by the Danish

Committee on Scientific Dishonesty (Nature Vol. 427, p 381, 2004). This doesn’t automatically mean

he and Mousseau are wrong about the extent of Chernobyl effects, but there is plenty of evidence

that they are, e.g. 7-11. Brown dismisses the evidence of my colleagues (including Belarussian

scientists) and me by calling me a physicist and implying that I have never been to Chernobyl.

Interestingly, in the apparently meticulously constructed list of footnotes, she cites our paper

(showing abundant mammal populations in the CEZ) wrongly as “Smith et al…” rather than

“Deryabina et al..” as it should be since Tatiana Deryabina was first author. Is it an error (we all make

them)? Unfortunately, this error hides the fact that Belarussian scientists were a key part of the

study so that Manual for Survival can argue (wrongly) that it was done by someone with no

knowledge of the CEZ.

The omissions in this section are shocking. Brown has not talked to and does not mention the one

person in the world who is most closely associated with wildlife at Chernobyl: Sergey Gaschak.

Sergey (much to his frustration at times) is the person who journalists always seem to go to to find

out about wildlife in the CEZ. Brown may not agree with Gaschak’s opinion (formed from 30 years in
the Zone and an intimate knowledge of the zone’s habitats and wildlife) that wildlife is not

significantly affected by radiation at Chernobyl, but she should at least report it. Gaschak initially

worked with Møller and Mousseau but refused to continue: he didn’t trust their reporting of data,

particularly on the influence of habitat on bird distribution 12. Brown does not discuss the work of

Ron Chesser and Robert Baker at Texas Tech University who spent many years studying small

mammals in the Red Forest hot spot. They found that small mammal abundance was similar in the

Red Forest to control areas 13 and that genetic effects were subtle. Chesser and Baker’s thoughts on

their long experience of radioecological research at Chernobyl are essential reading for an

understanding of this issue. Again, you don’t need to dig in Soviet archives: their article, ignored in

Manual for Survival, is in American Scientist 14.

Health effects and Chronic Radiation Sickness

My faith in Brown as an accurate reporter of radiation health effects was a bit shaken when I was

interviewed by her. Despite having already written Plutopia (Oxford University Press, 2013), her

fascinating, but scientifically flawed, account of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons programmes,

she very clearly did not know that non-radiation related cancer was very common across the world.

There are a myriad of health statistics on this, but you don’t need to look that far: Cancer Research

UK, for example, state on their website (and advertising) the projection that half of UK citizens will

get cancer at some point in our lives. I was further shocked to read in this Chernobyl book (p 25)

Brown’s bald statement that radiation is the only known cause of myeloid leukemia, in the context

clearly implying (wrongly) that there are no other causes. Brown did not consider or cite any of the

public health statistics on myeloid leukemia incidence in countries worldwide. Nor does she cite the

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Life Span Study (LSS) report 15 which clearly presents evidence that radiation

is a cause of myeloid leukemia (very significant at high doses), but is very far from being the only
cause, particularly at low dose rates. Nor does she cite her own statement on page 168 that

“radiation damage is hard to isolate and detect because it causes no new, stand-alone illnesses”.

The most controversial claim in this book is that very low dose radiation causes Chronic Radiation

Sickness. Chronic Radiation Sickness is real, having first been seen (but recognised late) at very high

dose rates in radium dial painters a century ago. It was seen in highly-exposed workers at the Mayak

Plutonium Production Plant where it was first diagnosed and treated by Angelina Gus’kova. In the

first part of Manual for Survival, Gus’kova is rightly described as a scientific hero (“No-one in the

world had treated more patients with radiation illness than Gus’kova” p 13; “Working on hundreds

of patients .. over three decades, Gus’kova developed a compendium of knowledge on radiation

medicine that had no equivalent in the world” p 15). As detailed in Manual for Survival, Gus’kova’s

work treating the early victims of Chernobyl (the 134 people suffering from Acute Radiation

Syndrome) saved and extended many lives. Brown contrasts Gus’kova’s deep understanding of

radiation sickness with the relative inexperience of the American doctor, Robert Gale, who flew in to

help treat the victims. Brown argues, powerfully, that Gale thought he knew better than the Soviet

scientist and ignored her expertise.

Sadly, the American doctor wasn’t the only person to ignore Angelina Gus’kova’s expertise: Brown

herself does so. Gus’kova not only treated sufferers of Acute Radiation Sickness, but also checked

evacuees and took part in the study of the “liquidators”, the hundreds of thousands of people who

worked on the Chernobyl clean-up operation in 1986 and 87 and who received some of the highest

radiation doses. In a 2012 article, Gus’kova 16 stated that “In contrast to the first group [the 134 ARS

victims], this second group of individuals working within the 30-km zone, just as the population

exposed to radiation [my emphasis], did not exhibit any manifestations of radiation sickness.”
So, the world-leading expert in chronic radiation sickness has stated that she did not believe that

either the huge liquidator group, or the population exposed to chronic, relatively low dose rate

radiation suffered from radiation sickness. Kate Brown would doubtless argue that Gus’kova’s high

status in Soviet and Russian atomic science made her ignore evidence to the contrary. Whether you

believe Gus’kova or not (I do), for Brown to exclude this key evidence from a history book about the

health effects of Chernobyl is an omission of monumental proportions.

Manual for Survival argues that Western scientists knew less about the health effects of radiation

than their Soviet (and post-Soviet) counterparts. Evidence of apparent damage to health of adults,

children and newborns in the contaminated regions is cited from archival material in Ukraine and

Belarus. Brown claims that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Life Span Study (on which the system of

radiation protection is largely, but far from wholly, based) missed many early effects of radiation

since it only started in 1950, five years after the bombs were dropped. This is partly, but not wholly,

true: effects of fetal exposure could be, and were, studied 17. Effects on children due to pre-

conception exposure of their parents was studied and no effects were found 18 allowing an upper

limit on risk of inter-generational mutation damage to be estimated.

Discounting the Life Span Study evidence allows Brown to argue that radiation is much worse than

UN organisations and the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) believe

(though note that these organisations consulted and had as members key former Soviet scientists,

including the radiation sickness expert Angelina Gus’kova). Astonishingly, however, Manual for

Survival ignores almost all the other international scientific evidence on this issue. Hundreds of

footnotes detail Soviet and former-Soviet sources, but there are barely any citations from the many
epidemiological studies (not just the LSS) and thousands of radiobiological studies in the

international scientific literature (see, for just one example, the Oxford Restatement on this issue 19).

The few international sources which are cited are those (some of them highly controversial) which

agree with Brown’s various contradictory and confusing hypotheses.

What of the public health statistics apparently showing huge increases in birth defects, cancers and a

wide range of other illnesses in the populations of the contaminated territories ? Though Brown has

apparently uncovered new archival evidence (which should be evaluated, if they have not already

been), I am highly skeptical. I suspect (but don’t know) that much of this evidence is similar to that

presented in the controversial Yablokov report 2 claiming nearly a million deaths from Chernobyl. I’m

not an epidemiologist, but I have tried to take a look at these claims.

Firstly, I looked again at the 2006 WHO Chernobyl Forum Report 20. The 45 international experts

(including experts from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia) evaluated a wealth of data on health effects of

Chernobyl. The report (strangely, hardly mentioned in Manual for Survival) covers a wide spectrum

of health outcomes including cancer and non-cancer effects in adults and children as well as adverse

pregnancy outcomes. It comes to a very different conclusion to Manual for Survival. Have the

international experts ignored or missed key evidence? I think it very unlikely, but what to me is

missing from the WHO report is a clear explanation, in lay-persons terms, of why this evidence is not

included.

I’ve taken a look at some (but of course not all) of this evidence and it seems obvious to me why

much of it wasn’t included. Health effects studies after Chernobyl suffered from two major

problems: changes and errors in reporting before and after the accident, and a difficulty in
disentangling radiation health effects from the ongoing public health crisis during and after the

collapse of the Soviet Union. Both of these effects are real: they are mentioned in Manual for

Survival but are discounted when claims of huge radiation health effects are being made.

Problems in health reporting. I’m currently working in the Narodichi district of Ukraine on a small

project trying to make the lives of people in affected areas a little bit better by bringing abandoned

agricultural land back into use, where it can be done safely. As part of the project, we spoke to

Anatoly Prysyazhnyuk, a cancer-doctor and epidemiologist. Anatoly was born in Narodichi to a family

of local doctors and is an Honoured Citizen of Narodichi, but was working in Kiev at the time of the

accident. He told us that, in 1987, he was contacted by the head of the local hospital. The hospital

chief was very worried that cancer registrations had increased significantly since the accident.

Anatoly went back to his home town to investigate. He found that, indeed, cancer registrations had

gone up, but that this was due to reporting changes, not to radiation. Changes in reporting of health

outcomes are real and are a key consideration in interpreting health statistics as the 45 WHO experts

no doubt knew.

Misuse of public health statistics In his review of the flawed Yablokov 2 report, Mikhail Balonov 1 cites

data on mortality rates across Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union 21. As Balonov notes,

mortality rates increased since 1991 in all parts of Russia, even in Siberia, thousands of miles from

Chernobyl. As shown in Figure 1, demographers have attributed this to economic crisis, alcohol

consumption and smoking, not radiation. Trends in mortality, and other health outcomes, are

compromised by this widespread health crisis. Comparing public health statistics between

contaminated and uncontaminated regions is also fraught with difficulty owing to known

demographic changes in the contaminated regions (younger people tended to leave, older people

tended to stay).
Oddly, Kate Brown accepts problems in distinguishing radiation effects in health data. Her treatment

of Fred Mettler’s study of 1656 inhabitants, including children, of the affected and non-affected

areas 22 is revealing of the huge contradictions at the heart of Brown’s thesis. Manual for Survival

reports the finding of this study: that no significant differences could be found between 853

inhabitants of contaminated areas and 803 inhabitants of control areas. But Brown goes on to

attempt to discredit this study. Firstly, she argues that doses were not different between control and

contaminated regions due to trade in foodstuffs. This ignores the fact that this (as well as making

little sense) was checked in the study: “Samples of bread, milk, vegetables and meat were also

examined from these control settlements. Analysis revealed low levels of contamination, as

expected” (IAEA22 p 283-284).

Secondly, Brown argues that that a 1600 person study is not sufficient to find evidence of the low-

probability health effects of low dose radiation. She is right, but what is astonishing that she does

not apply this logic to many of the other claims in her book. In most of the book she seems to be

claiming major health effects which would have been picked up by the IAEA screening. Indeed, the

report 22 includes a power analysis of the study showing what sort of health effect the study could

detect. Later on in the book, Brown supports her claims of non-cancer health effects of radiation by

referring to large scale studies (hundreds of thousands of subjects) which may (or may not) indicate

a tiny increase in cardiovascular risk at low dose rates (of the order of the majority of doses received

by the Chernobyl affected populations). But she ignores the key point: even if real, these tiny non-

cancer health effects are of no significant relevance to the health of people living in contaminated

areas. What they need to worry about (and often are worried about, of course), as has been pointed

out many times before23,24, is the high rates of unemployment, poor condition of their health

services, diet, nutrition, smoking, alcohol consumption etc.

This is not to say that there have been no health effects of Chernobyl. As noted by Brown, the cancer

effect which can most clearly and unambiguously be attributed to radiation is thyroid cancer in

children and adults exposed as children to fast-decaying I-131 in the weeks after the accident. The

increase in the affected regions was large and could be seen even in national health statistics: annual

incidence in Belarus, for example, increased from fewer than one case in 100,000 before 1986 to 7-8

cases per 100,000 in the 1990’s 25 and remains elevated. There is evidence of a potential increase in

breast cancer26, though note that this study concluded that “the age‐adjusted breast cancer

incidence rates in the most contaminated regions of Belarus and Ukraine are still lower than in North

America and Western Europe”. Other cancer incidence from dose reconstruction across Europe has

been estimated by Cardis et al. 27,28, if you apply the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) hypothesis that even

tiny radiation doses carry a potential risk.

Figure 1. Graphic illustrating the changes in life expectancy in Russia (not linked to radiation) from

1981-2002 29, loss of life expectancy in the high dose group of atomic bomb survivors; smoking

prevalence in former Soviet countries;.

Berries with radiocaesium in Polessie

A claim in Manual for Survival is that, even after the initial period of iodine contamination,

contaminated produce, particularly milk, was still consumed by people in the years after the

accident, even though it was over the (quite cautious) limits for radiocaesium in food products in

place in the former Soviet countries. Again, this isn’t a historical fact hidden in Soviet archives: it is

there in the scientific literature and in official statistics of the affected countries. In my co-authored

book on Chernobyl 30, we reproduced a table from Firsakova 31 showing changes in the number of

kilotonnes of milk and meat from collective farms which were above intervention limits.

One of the “headline” claims in Manual for Survival is that contaminated berries have up to 3000

Bq/kg of 137Cs (well above the Ukrainian limit) and that these may be being mixed with

uncontaminated berries and exported to Western Europe. Of course, that is not a good thing, but is

it a really bad thing? Manual for Survival implies that this is really dangerous, but provides no

context to help the reader evaluate what the risk is. It may help to place this in context that after

Chernobyl, the Norwegian government made the difficult decision to increase the limit on 137Cs

concentrations in reindeer meat to up to 6000 Bq/kg (in 1994 it was reduced to 3000 Bq/kg) 32.

Why? Because they sensibly balanced the tiny risk to the reindeer herders, and Norwegian

consumers against the damage of a ban to the lifestyles and culture of the herding community. I

don’t know enough about the berry-pickers of Rivne, Ukraine to make such a decision, but Brown is

wrong to imply that this is very dangerous. I’m in no way advocating allowing regulatory limits to be

broken, just that breaking these very cautious limits doesn’t mean something is dangerous. As a

European consumer, if I somehow managed (a vanishingly unlikely event) to eat a whole kg of the

most contaminated berries, I would get an additional dose equivalent to about two chest X-rays, a

return flight from Los Angeles to New York or 250 times lower than an abdominal CT scan.
The residents of Polessie are eating contaminated produce all the time: this is why we calculate the

overall dose. Only a small proportion of people now living in the contaminated regions get a dose

more than 2 mSv per year and the vast majority get a dose less than 1 mSv per year. These dose

rates are well within the variation of natural background radiation worldwide.

Nuclear Weapons Testing

Manual for Survival argues that Chernobyl was just an acceleration of a process, damaging to the

whole planet, started during the atmospheric bomb tests of the 1950’s and ‘60’s. I agree with

Brown that, if you believe in the LNT hypothesis that every small radiation dose carries a risk, then

the global health consequences of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing are huge. Like many claims

in Manual for Survival, this claim is treated as news, but it is only alarming news if you ignore the

mass of scientific evidence. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation

(UNSCEAR) have published many reports on this. The estimated collective dose from atmospheric

weapons testing is huge and dwarfs that of Chernobyl. But individual doses are, of course, low:

UNSCEAR 33 reports peak annual total effective dose in 1963 in the region of 0.1 mSv. This is about

the equivalent dose to a return flight from London-Los Angeles (from cosmic radiation) for everyone

in the Northern Hemisphere and about one thirtieth of annual natural background radiation dose

rates. Any extra dose above background could be a potential risk. But Brown’s vague assertion that

this could be a significant cause of long term increases in cancer incidence worldwide, without any

supporting evidence, is unconvincing, to say the least.

Omissions and errors

One of the major failings of this book is that the vast body of knowledge in the international

scientific literature is almost completely ignored. Other omissions I noted are: no discussion of
natural radioactivity, no mention of thyroid treatment by I-131, medical diagnostic doses or all the

epidemiological evidence from medical diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. There are more

omissions and many more errors than I have had the space to point out here.

Breaking the Laws of Physics

These are maybe minor points, but I think it indicates something about the poor quality of this book

when I have to point out that Manual for Survival gives credence to three claims that break current

Laws of Physics:

1. It apparently gives credence to the view (page 215) that nuclear weapons testing on Earth,

through the vacuum of space, somehow influenced the Sun’s solar flare activity. It’s true

that nuclear weapons have terrifying destructive power – the biggest are equivalent to 50

megatonnes of TNT. I could write an essay on why these couldn’t influence solar flare

activity, but perhaps a comparison of relative energy is best. I studied astrophysics more

than 30 years ago and have forgotten what I learnt about solar flares, so went to NASA’s

website (https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55580). I found that “solar flares… are

capable of releasing as much energy as a billion megatonnes of TNT”, twenty million times

bigger than the biggest nuclear bomb. Solar activity, of course, affects Earth, not least in the

charged particles contributing to the cosmic and natural background radiation we all receive

every day. The astonishing omission of any discussion of natural radiation doses is just

another fatal flaw in Manual for Survival.

2. It reports (page 302) that “the period of half of 137Cs to disappear from Chernobyl forests will

be between 180 and 320 years”, citing “Wired” magazine. The physical decay half life of 137Cs

is about 30.2 years. In the years after Chernobyl it has been pointed out many times, by me

and many others, that in soils rich in organic matter, the effective ecological half life of 137Cs
 is approaching it’s physical decay half life (e.g. 34). But it can’t go higher than 30.2 years,

unless, of course, the Laws of Physics are wrong.

3. Kate Brown’s dosimeter was “jumping in alarm” in the most contaminated Red Forest area

(page 125), apparently due to a previous forest fire. I’m struggling to understand what

Brown means here, but she seems to be claiming that her dosimeter was reading 1000

µSv/h when normally the Red Forest reads (a very high) 50-100 µSv/h. Here Brown claims

that a fire the previous year has caused the 10 times increase in dose rate because the fire

released radioactivity. Again, there is so much wrong with this hypothesis that I hardly know

where to start. Yes forest fires can release small amounts of radioactivity to the air, but why

should this have a significant (10x) influence on external gamma dose rates ? For an

understanding of effects of forest fires on radionuclide resuspension, Brown could have

studied and cited previous work on this e.g. 35.

The Laws of Physics are not set in stone, and physicists make mistakes too, but I don’t think we’re

going to start re-writing the textbooks yet. I’m not expecting Brown to understand all the physics of

radiation protection, but I do expect her to consider the huge amount of available scientific

knowledge and opinions.

What can we learn from this book ?

In this review I’ve necessarily focussed primarily on the (many) flaws and omissions in the book.

Manual for Survival is a polemic, not a history book and much less a science book. Brown is rightly

angry at the Soviet (and some Western) cover-ups, the haphazard and often inefficient relocations.

After Chernobyl, people got bigger doses than they needed, particularly the unforgivably large

thyroid doses due to failure to prevent ingestion of 131I in the first weeks after the accident. She is

also angry that the people living in the Chernobyl contaminated areas have seemingly been
forgotten by the international community. International scientific and humanitarian efforts (with

many notable exceptions) have been piecemeal, often with little and inconsistent funding, and have

very often failed (partly due to the complexities of working in the post-Soviet countries). I would

contrast the inconsistent funding for economic redevelopment in the Chernobyl contaminated areas

with the about $US 1.5 billion committed to the New Safe Confinement and reactor

decommissioning project.

I remember vividly, in the mid-1990’s, studying fish at Lake Kozhanovskoe in Russia. The fish had

accumulated 137Cs activity concentrations far above intervention limits, but people were still eating

the fish. Naively, I asked a fisherman why he was eating these fish: he looked at me blankly – as if I

had come from another world – and responded drily: “what do you expect me to eat ?”. At the time,

there was little food in rural shops. At that point, I realised that the radioactivity in the fish was the

least of the fisherman’s problems.

I’m angry that too often, both in the affected countries and abroad, myths about radiation have

been spread: I think these do real damage to people’s lives and have undoubtedly hampered

recovery from the disaster. Manual for Survival perpetuates many of those myths, but I think we

should learn from it. I’m also angry at myself, and my scientific field for not having worked harder to

counter those myths. Kate Brown has a journalist’s skill in capturing the individual tragedies of many

people’s lives in the Chernobyl contaminated lands and she puts this to good use in describing her

many visits to these areas. The problem is real, but I think the diagnosis offered in Manual for

Survival is very wrong and damaging. People in the Chernobyl affected areas need more jobs, more

economic development, better healthcare and better nutrition. Current radiation should be the least

of their concerns, though I understand why many (not all) still worry.
Acknowledgements

I currently have funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council project iCLEAR –

Innovating the Chernobyl Landscape: Environmental Assessment for Rehabilitation and

Management (NE/R009619/1).

Conflict of interest

I have previously had a small amount of funding from the nuclear industry and a larger project from

the NERC part funded by Radioactive Waste Management and the UK Environment Agency. This will

likely be perceived by some as a conflict of interest. I am proud to be making a small contribution to

helping the clean-up of the UK’s nuclear waste legacy and to a debate on the future of nuclear

power which is based on scientific evidence.

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